The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain (1870-1914): Some Observations on Competition and Cain-Abel ...

Marco Frenschkowski
The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies,
and the Occult Field in Great Britain
(1870–1914): Some Observations
on Competition and Cain-Abel Conflicts
Abstract: The emergence of Religious Studies, or “the science of religion”, as it
used to be called in Great Britain, in the late 19th century is accompanied by a
competition with other discourses interpreting religion. The present article
(abridgment of a longer study) analyses the social and cultural place of Victorian
and Edwardian Religious Studies as a project only partially existing in a
University context, but mainly in learned societies, as the Folklore Society,
and promulgated by scholars with a predominantly non-theological background.
As such Religious Studies were both influenced by and competing with occult
and esoteric groups interpreting religion and searching for a basic unity of reli-
gions as first of all the Theosophical Society, but also by and with other groups.

1 The Emergence of a New Science of Religion
  in Great Britain: Introductory Remarks
How do new sciences come into being?1 “We are all, we who work at these topics,
engaged in science, the science of man, or rather we are painfully labouring to lay
the foundations of that science“, Andrew Lang says in the same year that Queen
Victoria died.2 Now the Scottish writer Andrew Lang (1844–1912) during his life-
time had been a perhaps even more well-known scholar of folklore, folktales,
magic, religion and tradition in a more general way than even Sir James George
Frazer (1854–1941) who today is most often seen as the acme of late Victorian and
Edwardian scholarship on these subjects, both being Scotsmen and late descend-
ants of Scottish Enlichtenment, as it happens. Both had also been (in a respectful
way) opponents, and both embody the different poles of scholarship on religion
in late Victorian England.

1 This is a very much abridged version of a study which for space constraints could not be
published in this volume, with most documentation left out, which should appear at some
other occasion.
2 Andrew Lang, Magic and Religion (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 9.

  Open Access. © 2021 Marco Frenschkowski, published by De Gruyter.               This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664270-003

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain         45

    The Victorian and Edwardian Ages in Great Britain have seen the birth of quite
a number of new scientific approaches, culminating of course in Darwinism that
quickly changed so many outlooks and created a new profile of the whole age.
Edward Clodd (1840–1930), a scholar on the anthropological lines of E. B. Tylor,
biographer of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, wrote in 1891:

     Thus, the study of myth is nothing less than the study of the mental and spiritual history
     of mankind. It is a branch of that larger, vaster science of evolution which so occupies
     our thoughts to-day [. . .]. The evidence which it brings from the living and dead mythol-
     ogies of every race is in accord with that furnished by their more tangible relics, that the
     history of mankind is a history of slow but sure advance from a lower to a higher; of as-
     cent, although with oft backslidings. It confirms a momentous canon of modern science,
     that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as determinable as they are in the
     physical. [. . .] With the theory of evolution in our hands as the master-key, the immense
     array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and discrete are seen to be interrelated and in
     necessary dependence.3

This is a telling passage, expressed by a scholar both deeply sceptical about re-
ligion and deeply interested in it, as might also be said about Frazer. Evolution
became a basic paradigm: for biology as for cultural anthropology, for history
and philosophy, for religion as well as – we may add – for occultism and other
forms of rejected knowledge (to use the term of James Webb4).
     During the second half of the nineteenth century the colonial age had
reached a critical stage. British society realized that at least some of the coun-
tries which were part of the Empire did not simply exhibit inferior cultures, and
especially India had as much to give as it had to take from Europe. The drive
to re-organize the world according to British standards also allowed for a new
fascination with the sheer otherness of the cultures encountered. This colonial
experience coincided with a new look at oneʼs own cultural background.
Traditional agrarian society perceived from an industrial and urban setting sud-
denly seemed as strange as a far-away foreign country. What soldiers, mer-
chants, administrators and missionaries encountered in the colonial situation
somehow gave a new meaning to their own folktales and folklore at home. This
complex development contributed to the science of religion, defining its ideo-
logical background, and its deep connectedness to ethnology and folklore stud-
ies. A new science always will cover aspects of discovery as well as of conquest,
of curiosity and of fascination, but also of taking possession, even of invading a

3 Edward Clodd, Myths and Dreams (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), 139.
4 James Webb, Die Flucht vor der Vernunft. Politik, Kultur und Okkultismus im 19. Jahrhundert, ed.
Marco Frenschkowski and Michael Siefener, trans. Michael Siefener (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag,
2009).

46          Marco Frenschkowski

new area of knowledge. To express it in another way: a new science is the episte-
mological equivalent of colonialism. Does this apply also to Religious Studies, or
the science of religion? And how does it relate to the tension between mainstream
discourses and fringe discourses, between the basic epistemological identity of
nineteenth century society and its alterity? I concentrate in the following remarks
on Great Britain, and do not generally claim that the origin of Religious Studies
(to use a rather neutral though more recent term) in France, Germany, the
Netherlands, Japan or even in the USA can be described along the same lines.
    “The antecedents of comparative religion were far more numerous, and far
more diverse, than is commonly realised”.5 The “Science of Religion” can with
some plausibility be said to have come into being in the 1860–1900 period. The
term itself is a nineteenth century British creation coined first by Friedrich
Max Müller in 1860.6 Of course religion as a subject of comparative research
has a long scholarly ancestry with names like Herodotus, Plutarch and Porphyry,
al-Bīrūnī and aš-Šahrastānī, Nicolaus Cusanus, Alexander Ross, John Spencer
and Charles François Dupuis. A large number of ethnographic, oriental and other
scholars, travellers, colonial administration clerks and missionaries have con-
tributed to this ancestry as well. These older writers very much discuss the
diversity of religions, and seriously collect data, but they do not yet define a new
science. What they have achieved is not the same as what Friedrich Max Müller
(1823–1900), Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903),
William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), Andrew Lang, Edwin Sidney Hartland
(1848–1927), Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), Sir J. G. Frazer and, as an American
spending much time in Europe and a somewhat different thinker, William James
(1842–1910) had tried to do. What these scholars had in view might be called a
general theory of religion and its origins, analysed outside of Christian theological
prerequisites. As such it was meant to become a reference frame of religious his-
tory (more or less according to an evolutionary paradigm) that allows for a gen-
eral pattern on how religion develops, and what its changing place in culture
might be. Comparative religion (a term coming into more general use in the early
twentieth century) or history of religion were established as parts of anthropol-
ogy, and, perhaps even more telling, in very close contact with folklore studies.
With the exception of Spencer and James all scholars we mentioned strongly in-
teract with folklore studies (or criticize it, as Müller): comparative religion and

5 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986), 1.
6 Cf. Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth. (Edinburgh: T. &
T. Clark, 1905), 25; Lourens van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities
(Leiden: Brill, 2002), 294 n. 3.

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain       47

folklore studies are almost twin sisters, and their ways separated in Britain only
slowly around WWI.
     Historical linguistics with the Leipzig School of Neogrammarians had in the
1860s–1890s proven the strict regularity of sound changes, and by this had
founded a science of language that could treat language and etymology on histori-
cal lines comparable to the natural sciences. Scholars like Müller who had a strong
background in historical linguistics to some degree hoped for a science of religion
that could meet on equal terms with such achievements. His interest had been
originally in mythology and its origin. Like Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809),
Adalbert Kuhn (1812–1881), George William Cox (1827–1902), Friedrich Leberecht
Wilhelm Schwartz (1821–1899), Abram Smythe Palmer (1844–1917) and many
others, he was fascinated by mythology as a possible poetic interpretation and ex-
pression of nature and its forces (“naturmythologische Schule”), but as is well
known he also emphasized its possible origin in metaphorical language as such.7
With William Robertson Smith and his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites
(1889)8 ritual took its place next to mythology as something to be researched on
comparative and historical lines as well. The term “comparative mythology”
is much older than “comparative religion”, used e.g. by Müller already in his
“Comparative Mythology” of 1856, a study re-issued by his disciple Abraham
Smythe Palmer with many annotations as late as 1908. Interestingly Müller
himself saw the Moghul emperor Akbar (1542–1605) as the first person “who
ventured on a comparative study of the religions of the world”.9
     Earlier scholars of religions had been mostly theologians, or at least they
moved in a reference frame defined by different Christian theologies of religion.
This now changed rapidly, for quite different reasons. William Robinson Smith
had been mobbed out of academic theology at Aberdeen Free Church College in
1881 (he became librarian in Cambridge, and later first Reader and then from
1889 on Professor of Arabic), as in Germany something similar happened a year
later to Julius Wellhausen, greatest Old Testament scholar of his generation,
when he had to resign his theological chair at the University of Greifswald.10
More importantly, scholars increasingly began researching religion who had no

7 Cf. Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller, 253–292.
8 William R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: Fundamental Institutions, 1st ser.
(London: Adam & Charles Black, 1889).
9 Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the
Royal Institution; With two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1873), 209.
10 Marco Frenschkowski, “Wellhausen, Julius,” in Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchen Lexikon
13, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz (Hamm: Bautz, 1998), 716–727.

48          Marco Frenschkowski

theological background, had never worked in a church context and did not use
a theological reference frame in their style of asking questions. F. M. Müller had
been a German philologian of Indo-European languages specializing in Sanskrit,
who was invited to work in Oxford and edit the Rig-Veda (being a foreigner, he
did not become Boden Professor of Sanskrit, however).11 E. B. Tylor came from a
wealthy family of Quakers who owned a London brass factory, a religious back-
ground which effectively prevented his gaining a University degree and an early
academic career: he started his work by collecting ethnological data in Mexico.
J. G. Frazer was initially a classical philologian (his commentaries on Ovid, Ps.-
Apollodor and Pausanias still are monuments of erudition), and he only slowly
began to include ethnological material in his theories, after having read Tylor
and having made the personal acquaintance of W. Robertson Smith (whom he
regarded as the “greatest man he had ever known”, as he told to his biographer
R. Angus Downie), widening the horizon of classical studies in an unprecedented
way.12 E. S. Hartland had made a career as a solicitor in Swansea (though his
father was a congregational minister). Frazerʼs father also had wanted his son to
enter the legal profession, and Frazer even qualified for the bar, though later he
never practiced law. Hartland, who lived from this practice, turned from folklore
scholarship to impressive comparative studies on religion, giving attention also
to aspects of social history. (John Ferguson McLennan, 1827–1881, who preceded
Hartland in his extensive studies on family and kinship structures in primitive
religion, also by profession had been an advocate). Andrew Lang, son of a town
clerk at Selkirk, had been a historian, literary critic, writer, editor of the most suc-
cessful folktale collections of the Victorian age, a poet and general man of letters.
Later he became an honorary fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In Religious
Studies he was the main opponent of Frazer, though they had more in common
than meets the eye at first glance. Other names might be mentioned as well
(William James, born into a wealthy American family, interestingly had a differ-
ent background, having been the son of a Swedenborgian preacher, Henry James
Sr.). No one of these scholars we have in view had ever studied Christian theol-
ogy as a regular study. Religion was very much a subject of public debate in
Victorian society, however, and many non-theologians participated. Müller could
even write, in the passages introducing his Sacred Books of the East, the most

11 His German roots made him suspect in the United Kingdom: “Von der deutschen Theologie
sprach man wie von einer Art verbotener Frucht, die man weder ansehen, noch antasten, noch
gar kosten dürfe” (Friedrich Max Müller, Aus meinem Leben: Fragmente zu einer Selbstbiographie
(Gotha: Perthes, 1902), 244).
12 Cf. Emily Varto, ed., Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology (Leiden: Brill,
2018).

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain     49

enduring monument of Victorian scholarship on religion: “No doubt there exists
at present a very keen interest in questions connected with the origin, the
growth, and decay of religion”.13 Even Thomas Huxley, Darwinʼs most successful
and noted populariser, biologist and defender of rationalism, wrote extensively
on religion. In the nine volumes of his Collected Essays (1893–1894)14 approxi-
mately a third of the studies touch on religious matters, and two full volumes are
dedicated to “Science and Hebrew tradition” (i.e. the Pentateuch and other Old
Testament matters) and “Science and Christian tradition”, interpreting religion
on evolutionary lines. About Huxleyʼs standing as a public intellectual Andrew
Lang could even write in 1894: “In England, when people say “science”, they
commonly mean an article by Professor Huxley in The Nineteenth Century”.15

2 The Science of Religion and Its Hidden
  Dialogue with Occultism
This volume (and the conference it records) starts with the working hypothesis
that occultism in a wide sense, encompassing spiritualism, theosophy and
other forms of rejected and alternate knowledge, has a place in the early history
of religious studies. What exactly this place might have been remains to be fig-
ured out. If we cast our net too wide, we will not be able to get past vague im-
pressions and general ideas about possible influences. This will lead exactly
nowhere. But we can reasonably ask a number of relevant smaller questions
that can possibly be answered, and might indeed help to get to a more nuanced
image of the science of religion in its early days. Some of these smaller ques-
tions are: What can reasonably be said about common ideas and paradigms be-
tween the competing systems of interpretation? Do they have a common social
and cultural background, to some degree? What about their networking? To
what degree did the relevant people know (and perhaps respect) each other? To
understand a new science it is not enough to take a close look at its intellectual
world, and it is not enough to read its books, but we have to look at the scholars

13 Friedrich Max Müller, The Upanishads I, The Sacred Books of the East 1 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1879), XLII.
14 Thomas Huxley, Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893–1895).
15 Andrew Lang, The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Selected Writings, ed. Andrew Teverson,
Alexandra Warwick, and Leigh Wilson, vol 1, Anthropology: Fairy Tale, Folklore, the Origins
of Religion, Psychical Research (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 268.

50         Marco Frenschkowski

who created it, their social and cultural background, their agendas, their careers,
their desire for knowledge. What do we know about the personal hidden research
agendas and belief systems of the relevant scholars? Do their letters and diaries
make agendas visible that did not go into published studies? Tylor for example
as a young man collected material on Spiritualism in which he never believed
but which went into the ideas of Primitive Culture,16 his major and most influen-
tial work. Wouter Hanegraaff in a study published in 1998 put some emphasis on
this point in his discussion of Tylorʼs views on magic, which for Tylor at first
glance is essentially superstition. Hanegraaff makes plausible that both Tylorʼs
and Frazerʼs views on magic “have their origin in the late fifteenth and early six-
teenth century, although their backgrounds are ultimately rooted in antiquity”.17
He demonstrates that categories and distinctions vital to both authors can be de-
rived from writers as Agrippa, author of the most influential Renaissance treatise
on magic.18 An 1872 notebook of Tylor documents his interest and deep re-
searches in spiritualism, even attending spiritist séances in London.19 It is gener-
ally assumed he did not share any supernatural convictions, but this is not
completely true: Tylor opens a crack in the door to occultism conceding there
may be at least something in it:
     My judgment is in abeyance. I admit a prima facie case on evidence, & will not deny that
     there may be psychic forces causing raps, movements, levitations, etc. But it has not
     proved itself by evidence of my sense, and I distinctly think the case weaker than written
     documents led me to think.20

This is in some opposition to his attacks on superstition, and also clearly says his
belief in the possibility of spiritualist phenomena to have been greater before he
visited séances, i.e. when he wrote Primitive Culture. Even more interesting is the

16 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, vol. 1, 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1920)
141–143.
17 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Emergence of the Academic Science of Magic: The Occult
Philosophy in Tylor and Frazer,” in Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of
Religion, ed. Arie L. Moldedijk et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 254.
18 Hanegraaf, “Emergence of the Academic Science,” 266. Cf. Marco Frenschkowski,
„Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim und seine „Okkulte Philosophie“: Ein Vorwort,“ in
Agrippa Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Die magischen Werke und weitere
Renaissancetraktate, ed. and introd. Marco Frenschkowski (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2008),
23–45.
19 Published in: George W. Stocking, “Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylorʼs Unpublished
Notes on Spiritualism,” Man 6 (1971): 88–104.
20 Cited in Stocking, “Animism in Theory and Practice,” 100.

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain             51

choice of subjects in his Magnum opus. Magic and witchcraft are omnipresent.21
Spiritualism, table-rapping, tales of possession are discussed as alleged survivals
of primitive attitudes.22 Stories about levitation are treated at much more length
than the argument requires:23 they clearly fascinated Tylor, as do the magical
school of Salamanca, lycanthropy, incubi, demonology, vampires24 and of course
more generally all kinds of mythology, which he sees as a savage occupation of a
quintessentially childlike mind.25 This metaphor of magic and mythology as rep-
resenting a “child phase” of human history is very common in Victorian ethnol-
ogy.26 Though there are many other subjects included in his survey of “primitive
culture”, the prevalence of occult and magical matters is significant (Adolf
Bastian and Jacob Grimm being among his main sources for details). Tylor virtu-
ally identifies magic with “occult science”.27 Magic is “a contemptible supersti-
tion” and “one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind”.28 But
his statements on the relation between religion and magic are contradictory,29
and a certain ambiguity between his judgements and his thematic preferences is
observable.
     Frazer used much more clear-cut terms, but the basic observation holds
true for him also. Tylorʼs polemics against magic, and even more against ec-
static and visionary elements in religions30 have an element of warding off, of
an exorcism against irrationalism. But his fascination with magic looms up
again when we learn he privately and passionately collected charms and amu-
lets: at the Second International Folk-Lore Congress which met at the Society of
Antiquaries in London (Burlington House) in Oct. 1–7, 1891 Tylor even put his
collection on public exhibition, commenting on the subject:

     Though often written of, such objects are comparatively seldom seen so that it is still
     worthwhile to exhibit specimens of them to students of Folk-lore. [. . .] I have for years

21 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 112–159; Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 111–112. a.o.
22 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 141–148; cf. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 135 on exorcisms.
23 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 149–152.
24 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 85–86, 308–315; Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 189–194
(vampires are also a favourite subject in theosophical literature).
25 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 31, 176, 237, 284, 304, 368, 484 a.o.
26 Cf. e.g. Edward Clodd, The Childhood of Religions: Embracing a Simple Account of the Birth
and Growth of Myths and Legends (London: Henry S. King, 1875) passim; John Fiske, Myths
and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1902), 295.
27 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 128–129.
28 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 112–113.
29 Noted already by Hanegraaff, “The Emergence of the Academic Science of Magic,” 262–263.
30 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 49, 132, 182, 410, 415, 421 a.o.

52          Marco Frenschkowski

     endeavoured to prove that the main source of Mythology is also the main source of Magic.
     Down from our own level to that of the peasant and the savage, the process of sympathetic
     magic is to be traced to the same intelligible, but illogical, association of ideas which lies at
     the root of the apparently creative fancies of the myth-maker.31

Leland, the witchcraft scholar, was present at the exhibition and added com-
ments that have been printed also. Now and then Tylor polemicizes against
modern occultism, as e.g. when writing on snake cults, that indeed were
a subject of much interest to Victorian occultists.32 When dealing of the
Fortunate Islands, he playfully elaborates on the idea Britain itself may be a
kind of Island of the Dead, which may have led to its popular interest in
ghosts.33
     We have asked whether we can discern subjects that fascinated the early
scholars of religion, perhaps hinting at hidden backgrounds in their research
agendas, subjects or ideas that turn up again and again making plausible some
subtle and so to say subterraneous aspects not too obvious in the leading theo-
retical framework. It is not too difficult to find evidence in this quest.
     Edwin Sidney Hartland e.g., who had adopted the legal profession and
worked as a solicitor and in local politics, but also was keenly interested in
folklore and anthropology, wrote one the most remarkable books of the 1890s
on religion and myth, the three-volume monumental The Legend of Perseus.34
This indeed after The Golden Bough (first edition in two volumes 1890) has been
the most influential book in the growing field between comparative religion,
folklore studies and anthropology of the 1890s taking up Tylor’s basic concepts
and refining them, but it shared the fate of much pre-Frazerian works to fade
in the light of Frazer’s fame. Hartland still in the years around WWI wrote

31 Edward Burnett Tylor, “Exhibition of Charms and Amulets,” in The International Folk-Lore
Congress 1892: Papers and Transactions, ed. Joseph Jacobs, and Alfred Nutt (London: David
Nutt, 1892), 387.
32 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 233–242, particularly 239. On Leland see Marco Frenschkowski,
“Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) und die Ursprünge der Wicca-Religion,“ in Faszination des
Okkulten. Diskurse zum Übersinnlichen, ed. Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Christa Agnes Tuczay
(Tübingen: Francke 2008), 273–335.
33 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 63–64. On the background of this idea cf. Marco Frenschkowski,
“Fortunatae Insulae: Die Identifikation mythischer Inseln mit realen geographischen
Gegebenheiten in der griechischen und römischen Antike,” in Konstruktionen mediterraner
Insularitäten, ed. Reinhard von Bendemann et al. (Paderborn: Fink/Schöningh, 2016), 43–73.
34 Edwin S. Hartland, The Legend of Perseus: A Study of Tradition in Story, Custom, and Belief,
3 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1894–1896).

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain    53

important books in the field, as his Primitive Paternity.35 Volume two of his The
Legend of Perseus discusses the idea of the external soul, much captivating the
imagination of the Victorians (Oscar Wilde’s 1890–1891 novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray being a well-known example). The soul in this anthropological ap-
proach is not simply the soul of psychology: it is a mythical combination of life
soul, breath, shadow, double, heavenly archetype, blood soul, external soul
and life token, with other mental and magical aspects as well. Can we with
some plausibility see in this fascination with darker and less obvious and ar-
chaic complexities of the soul a connection to the complex theosophical models
of inner man?
     The fascination with archaic and complex concepts of soul is one such
example of a hidden agenda, the overwhelming and far-reaching obsession
with magic, sorcery, taboo complexes is a very obvious other one. This has
been observed before, of course: “Tylor and Frazer are pioneers in the “emer-
gence of the scientific study of religion”, but my analysis implies that their
work could with equal theoretical justification be referred to as a “scientific
study of magic”, Wouter Hanegraaff wrote.36 Without exception all authors we
have mentioned so far as scholars of religion in the years after Müller have ex-
tensively written on both European and non-European magic, perhaps more
than on any other aspect of religion (though they usually saw magic in opposi-
tion to religion, a view since discredited). Indeed for the most emphatically ra-
tionalist writers of our group (Tylor and Frazer), it can plausibly be called their
chosen main subject. On the level of public statements Frazer and Tylor were
quite sceptical, seeing themselves in the tradition of Scottish enlightenment
and rationalism with its pragmatic approach. And yet they spent their life re-
searching magic. This observation curiously finds some kind of synchronicity
in the renaissance of ceremonial magic in the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn founded in 188837 and similar late nineteenth century by-ways of Victorian
society. Ceremonial magic and scholarly fascination by magic are parallel sto-
ries not in any direct contact with each other (as far as we know), but they are
equally connected to the spirit of the Victorian age as an aspect of its non-
standard and non-mainstream underground. “The relations of religion and

35 Edwin S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity: The Myth of Supernatural Birth in Relation to the
History of the Family, 2 vols. (London: David Nutt, 1909–1910).
36 Hanegraaff, “The Emergence of the Academic Science of Magic,” 272–273.
37 For literature and sources see Marco Frenschkowski, Die Geheimbünde: Eine kulturge-
schichtliche Analyse, 6th ed. (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2016).

54         Marco Frenschkowski

magic”38 in some sense is the one main subject matter of early British cultural
anthropology, struggling to become part of the academic mainstream. Frazer, as
already mentioned, originally called his Magnum opus, still the best-known of
British books on primitive religion, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative
Religion (1890 edition), but he retitled it The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and
Religion in its second and third edition (1900 and 1906–1937).39 Even the rationalist
Edward Clodd, folklorist and friend of Frazer, was intrigued by ideas of magic
words and their effectivity. His monograph Tom Tit Tot40 is still a classic presenta-
tion on “words of power”, charms, conjurations and taboo words in folk tales.41
     In a more obvious sense Andrew Lang, who served at some time as presi-
dent both of the Society for Psychical Research and of the Folklore Society, was
an outspoken believer in psychic phenomena, though initially he was also
quite critical of psychic research. His name has lost much of its prestige as his
(later) theory on “savage high Gods” is particularly unpopular in later twentieth
and twenty-first century religious studies (though it is often much misunder-
stood). How does this all influence his researches into primitive religion, filling
many volumes?42 A story well-known in Folklore history is the years-long con-
flict between Andrew Lang and Edward Clodd which strained the Folklore
Society from 1895 on, when the medium Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918) was de-
bunked at the Cambridge home of Frederic W. H. Myers, till about 1901. Can
modern occult mediumistic phenomena help to understand ancient societies,
their religions and the experiences expressed in their religious ideas? Lang de-
fended this approach (Cock Lane and Common-Sense43 passim; also in his

38 Edwin S. Hartland, “The Relations of Religion and Magic,” in Ritual and Belief: Studies in
the History of Religion, ed. Edwin S. Hartland (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914).
39 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 1890); James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 12 vols. +
Aftermath, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1906–1937).
40 Edward Clodd, Tom Tit Tot: An Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-tale (London: Duckworth,
1898).
41 Cf. already Edward Burnett Tylor, “Images and Names,” in Researches into the Early
History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, new ed. (London: Routledge, 1994),
106–149.
42 Cf. e.g. Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1900); Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906); Lang,
Modern Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897); Lang, Magic and Religion; Lang,
Method in the Study of Totemism, (Glasgow: Maclehose 1911) and others; cf. Roger L. Green,
Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography (Leicester: Ward, 1946), 241–259.
43 Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1896).

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain         55

introduction to Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth,44 and in many other publications).
The rationalist Clodd, the biographer of Darwin and Thomas Huxley, Chairman
of the Rationalist Press Association from 1906 to 1913, vehemently denied such
a possibility, and declared scholars who used modern occult and spiritualist
parallels to understand ancient religions and magic as being obscurantist. His
later book The Question: A Brief History and Examination of Modern Spiritualism
(1917)45 launches a frontal attack on all kinds of occult discourses. This whole
discussion of course is not finally concluded even today. Frazer in a letter from
1917 addressed to Edward Clodd called it a scandal that some of the best sci-
entific minds (which he concedes) should be advocates for the Society for
Psychical Research, which for him meant: for occultism. Andrew Lang he saw
more as a man of letters than of science, and that perhaps the most enduring
of his works might prove to be his poems. This is a seriously insulting remark
about a scholar who wrote many books on religion, ritual, magic and folk tra-
dition, though Frazer speaks only in a private letter.46 We sense the deep irri-
tation the rationalist Frazer experiences by the work of scholars as Lang, or
indeed by all scholarship that questioned his feeling of superiority towards
religion as such and certainly towards magic.
     Lang himself already in Cock Lane and Common-Sense (first edition 1894)
had tried to bring folklore studies, psychic studies, anthropology and compara-
tive religion into some productive dialogue. Lang can be seen as a central figure
in our debate about the hidden agenda in early Religious Studies. In his essay
“Anthropology and Religion” that became part of his later work The Making of
Religion (second edition 1900) he wrote:

     Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the
     un-recognised in which Psychical Research is pining. The British Association used to re-
     ject anthropological papers as ‘vain dreams based on travellers’ tales.’ No doubt the
     British Association47 would reject a paper on clairvoyance as a vain dream based on old
     wives’ fables, or on hysterical imposture. Undeniably the study of such themes is ham-
     pered by fable and fraud, just as anthropology has to be ceaselessly on its guard against
     ‘travellers’ tales,’ against European misunderstandings of savage ideas, and against

44 Andrew Lang, Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth: The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns &
Fairies; A Study in Folk-lore & Psychical Research. Text by R. Kirk, M.A., Minister of Aberfoyle,
A.D. 1691, commented by A. Lang (London: Nutt, 1893).
45 Edward Clodd, The Question: A Brief History and Examination of Modern Spiritualism
(London: Richards, 1917).
46 Robert Ackerman, Selected Letters of Sir J.G. Frazer (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 317, 351.
47 A British science institution that as it seems is mentioned here pars pro toto for any kind of
official, institutionalized science.

56          Marco Frenschkowski

     civilised notions and scientific theories unconsciously read into barbaric customs, rites,
     traditions, and usages. [. . .] For these sound reasons official science long looked askance
     on Anthropology. Her followers were not regarded as genuine scholars, and, perhaps as a
     result of this contempt, they were often ‘broken men,’ intellectual outlaws, people of one
     wild idea. To the scientific mind, anthropologists or ethnologists were a horde who darkly
     muttered of serpent worship, phallus worship, Arkite doctrines, and the Ten Lost Tribes
     that kept turning up in the most unexpected places. Anthropologists were said to gloat
     over dirty rites of dirty savages, and to seek reason where there was none. The exiled, the
     outcast, the pariah of Science, is, indeed, apt to find himself in odd company. [. . .] But
     there was found at last to be reason in the thing, and method in the madness. Evolution
     was in it.48

This passage from Lang allows for some interesting observations about outside
perspectives on the new sciences of anthropology and comparative religion.
The “anthropologists” we are talking about did not have clear cut academic ca-
reers, and they were seen by the academic public as moving in the vicinity of
occult and “savage” believe systems. Tribal lore, magic, primitivism and ata-
vism as fields of research made them suspicious. They were very far from being
publicly recognized, and their occupation was always moving on the brink on
being seen as a pseudo-science dealing in “dirty savages”: exactly this is the
context that brought Religious Studies into being, at least in Great Britain.
Looking back after 150 years, it may have been to the best of the new science it
could not stage its own authority, but had to struggle for respectability. In the
first edition of Cock Lane and Common-Sense Lang wrote:

     When Anthropology first challenged the interpretation of myths given by philologists, we
     were told that Anthropology relied on mere travellers’ tales. It was answered that the co-
     incidence of report, in all ages and countries, and from all manner of independent observ-
     ers, unaware of each other’s existence, was a strong proof of general accuracy, while the
     statements of learned and scholarly men, like Codrington, Callaway, and many others,
     confirmed the strange stories of travellers like Herodotus, of missionaries, traders and ad-
     venturers. The same test of evidence, universally coincident, applies to many of the al-
     leged phenomena in this book (Preface).

“Test of evidence” is what we might call experience-based science, which (as
Lang of course was well aware of) cannot be interpreted without a theoretical
reference frame. Müller also had written about the resistance against compara-
tive religions and comparative language studies by those who feared it might
result in “the risk of losing the firm grasp which we ought to have on the few
[i.e. languages and religions] that are really important”.49

48 Lang, Making of Religion, 39–40.
49 Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 8–9.

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain        57

     Analysing the comparative religion writers we have in view, we can easily
discern two “types” or mental profiles: strict rationalists as Tylor, Frazer and
Clodd, and writers with mystical and perhaps to some degree occult inclinations
as Lang, James, Leland, who usually are also interested in psychic studies. Müller
and Smith are a kind of middle case, personally connected to a philosophical reli-
gion with a Christian background, though Müller denied the idea of special
revelation, and was inclined towards mysticism.50 Andrew Lang is perhaps
the most interesting scholar for our particular question. Some remarks about
his inner biography will be illuminating. We happen to know exactly what he
read as a student.51 In St. Andrews University, where he had been immatricu-
lated in 1861, he was fascinated by Paracelsus and Petrus of Abano, Cornelius
Agrippa and the alchemists, and of course by Lord Bulwer-Lytton, the most
important Victorian author of occult novels, and a main source of theosophi-
cal thinking. On the list of book he got from the library we find writers and
titles as Iamblichus and Michael Scotus, Benvenuto Cellini, the Grimm brothers,
the Mabinogion, Giambattista della Porta and books on alchemy. Particularly
Agrippa seems to have fascinated him. He was disappointed by the grimoires
he read, however. Now what does this prove? Does it prove anything?
Andrew Lang is a pivotal figure in other areas also. He was by far the most
successful author of the group we discuss (his fairy book collections were to
be met in every Victorian household), and he was the main antagonist of
Frazer. His Magic and Religion is a detailed discussion of The Golden Bough,
and in his criticism he anticipates what later became commonplaces of post-
Frazerian arguments, as for example with Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017),
who wrote his thesis The Glory, Jest and Riddle: James George Frazer and
The Golden Bough52 much in the same vein. No other British Victorian main-
stream writer on religion illustrates so clearly the deep connection between
folklore studies, comparative religion and the occult underground as Andrew
Lang.

50 Cf. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2010), 57.
51 Green, Andrew Lang, 20–21.
52 Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Glory, Jest and Riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough,”
(PhD diss., University of Yale, 1969).

58         Marco Frenschkowski

3 Basic Agendas I: The Unity of Religions,
  Past and Future
The pathos to find a common ground for religions or a basic unity of religions
might be called another common endeavour between occultism and compara-
tive religion. This basic idea has very different faces, of course. It can relate to a
primordial wisdom religion in the background of more recent religions, which
more or less pass it on, it can apply to a common denominator of religions as
they actually are, or it may relate to concepts of a future unity between religions
that can be prepared by interreligious dialogue. Both Theosophy and Müllerian
science of religion want to develop a new religion in harmony with both science
and philosophy though their approaches are completely different, and both be-
lieved that such a religion of the future would come when Western and Eastern
ideas would go together. Even E. B. Tylor who was much more an agnostic
than Müller concludes his work on Primitive Culture with some reluctant ideas
about the future of religion, and the part science may play in bringing it to
light. Like many Victorians he feared atavism, the backsliding of evolution. In
atavism (i.e. anachronistic survival) magic and animism might come back with
full force: survival becomes revival. The science of culture in such cases is a re-
former’s science.53
     In occultism ideas on the underlying unity of religions also have an aspect
of defining an agenda critical of present religions, particularly of Christianity.
This attitude can take two forms: the Blavatsky variant where Buddhist and
Hindu ideas (in a Westernized interpretation) give shape to the basic reference
frame, and the Christian Theosophy variant, where the paradigm includes
Neoplatonic, Christian and Hermetic elements. Occultist authors to some degree
competing with Helena Blavatsky in their concepts of the unity of all religion
(and of science and philosophy) have e.g. been Anna Kingsford (1846–1888),
Christian mystic, some-time theosophist, animal rights activist and the second
English woman to receive a degree in medicine, and also (with Edward Maitland)
author of The Perfect Way; or, the Finding of Christ.54 A second example even
more clearly trying to bring all religions into one common paradigm is Marie
Countess of Caithness, Duchess de Pomár, The Mystery of the Ages Contained in

53 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 453.
54 Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, The Perfect Way; or, The Finding of Christ, 7th ed.
(London: Field & Tuer, 1882; Macoy: Publishing & Masonic Supply Company 1919).

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain           59

the Secret Doctrine of all the Ages.55 This encompasses a wide range of questions
on religion, avoiding any too close contacts with Blavatskyan Theosophy, but
shares with her a deep interest in Asiatic traditions. Lady Caithness explicitly
refers to Müller and their shared appreciation of such interests, though her
own “Wisdom-Religion” is something quite different than what Müller had in
mind. Müller disagrees sharply with any mystification of older religions:

    Readers who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient Brahmans, the Avesta
    of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or the Koran of
    Mohammed are books full of primeval wisdom and religious enthusiasm, or at least of
    sound and simple moral teaching, will be disappointed on consulting these volumes.
    Looking at many of the books that have lately been published on the religions of the ancient
    world, I do not wonder that such a belief should have been raised; but I have long felt that it
    was high time to dispel such illusions, and to place the study of the ancient religions of the
    world on a more real and sound, on a more truly historical basis [. . .]. The time has come
    when the study of the ancient religions of mankind must be approached in a different, in a
    less enthusiastic, and more discriminating, in fact, in a more scholarlike spirit.56

We see here the common origin and also the parting of ways between Theosophy
and comparative religion. Strangely in his Theosophy, or Psychological Religion
with its philosophical ideas about the divine Logos in diverse religions Müller
comes much nearer to Caithness and Blavatsky than he seems to have realized.
He not just compares Indian Vedanta, Christian Logos theology and Muslim
(Sufi) mysticism, he states their basic connectedness, and claims a basic common
truth. As Madame Blavatsky he defines a higher religion which he sees as the
foundation and future of all true religion. A detailed comparison of their ap-
proaches – not possible in this small study – might reveal more many more as-
pects of such unexpected agreement in some basic paradigms. Emma Hardinge
Britten (1823–1899), the main historian of American spiritualism, might be men-
tioned as a further example of an occult approach facing comparative religion.
She was a founding member of the Theosophical Society from its first days on,
but after come conflict with Helena Blavatsky she left the Society in late 1877,
though some contact remained. She saw Spiritualism as the new religion of man-
kind, and gave an extensive summary of its pre-history and varieties in the reli-
gions of the world in her large book Nineteenth Century Miracles.57 A much less

55 Marie Countess of Caithness, Duchess de Pomár, The Mystery of the Ages Contained in the
Secret Doctrine of all the Ages (London: Wallace, 1887).
56 Müller, The Upanishads, IX–XI.
57 Emma Hardinge Britten, Nineteenth Century Miracles; or, Spirits and their Work in every
Country of the Earth: A Complete Historical Compendium of the Great Movement Known as
“Modern Spiritualism” (Manchester: William Britten, 1883).

60          Marco Frenschkowski

known, but even more ambitious work is her The Faiths, Facts, and Frauds of
Religious History,58 which tries to define an overall theory of the development of
religions. Such works might be called an occult “comparative religion”.
     In Europe comparative religion and theosophical “wisdom-religion” to some
degree almost are male and female variants of a common departure from Christian
theological paradigms. This is over-simplified, of course, and has to be qualified
with other differences between the discourses, but the tension between compara-
tive religion and occultism has important gender aspects. It is certainly not meth-
odology and perhaps also not so much some basic pattern of hermeneutics that
religious studies have in common with these occult and philosophical systems
(and of course they are divided by their fascination with “phenomena” and their
esotericism). The common ground they nevertheless share can be seen primarily in
the aspects of religion they choose as their objects of reflection, in their obsession
with tradition, magic, and other elements allegedly archaic in religion, and sec-
ondly in their willingness to see all aspects of religion as part of one living organ-
ism that can be explained by common laws, i.e. to look for one true religion not in
any “pure” or reformed variety of one specific religion, but in an extract from a
multitude of religions. None of the writers we have discussed has ever shown
much interest in the diversities of present-day religions: it is the primordial, be it
archaic magic, be it “wisdom of the ages” that they are looking for. These are dif-
ferent agendas, but they are deeply related, and can be interpreted as different fac-
ets of the Victorian imagination of culture in so far as it pertains to religion. Can
we say comparative religion competed with theosophy and similar systems for the
hegemony of interpreting religion and defining its basic unity?

4 Basic Agendas II: The Concept of Comparison
  in Comparative Religion
Scientific analysis in late nineteenth century cultural and historical science es-
sentially means comparison. Friedrich Max Müller had already written rather
programmatically in 1870:

     All higher knowledge is acquired by comparison, and rests on comparison. If it is said that
     the character of scientific research in our age is pre-eminently comparative, this really means

58 Emma Hardinge Britten, The Faiths, Facts, and Frauds of Religious History (Melbourne:
George Robertson, 1879).

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain          61

    that our researches are now based on the widest evidence that can be obtained, on the broad-
    est inductions that can be grasped by the human mind.59

Müller gives the indeed convincing examples that both biology and linguistics
achieved its greatest triumphs in the nineteenth century by strict and methodic
comparison. To understand religion meant for Müller, Tylor, Smith and without
any exception all scholars we have been discussing: to define patterns of com-
parison. They concentrated on “Aryan” (Indo-Europaean) and Semitic Religions,
with occasional sidelights on other religions as they became known. To some de-
gree they looked for wisdom from the East: but not from the Holy Land, as former
generations had done, but from sources farther east, “fetishizing the Vedas”.60
    In a similar vein the most important church historian of the early twentieth
century, Adolf von Harnack, could write in 1905:

    Im 19. Jahrhundert ist die vergleichende Methode geradezu zur Herrscherin in der Wissenschaft
    geworden. Vergleichende Sprach-, Religions-, Rechts- und Verfassungswissenschaft usw. sind
    an die Spitze getreten, und keine einzige Disziplin vermag sich dieser Methode zu entziehen.61

In more recent historical and cultural sciences of course things have changed
completely, and comparison has come under the general suspicion of looking
with European and American glasses or perspectives at non-Western people.
But it was different in the age we are speaking about. Both comparative religion
and occult and theosophical discourses very much participated in this general
pattern of the comparative method. The Golden Bough in its first 1890 edition
was subtitled A Study in Comparative Religion (later retitled in the second edition:
A Study in Magic and Religion). Even more explicit is a passage using a military
metaphor contrasting religion and theology with the new science: “Yet sooner or
later it is inevitable that the battery of the comparative method should breach
these venerable walls, mantled over with the ivy and mosses and wild flowers of
a thousand tender and sacred associations. At present we are only dragging the
guns into position; they have hardly yet begun to speak”.62 This passage taking
up the nineteenth century language of a “warfare” between science and religion
(mostly directed against the Roman Catholic Church) Frazer did not repeat later,

59 Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 9–10.
60 Marchand, characterizing this scholarship in: Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism
in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Washington, D.C.: German Historical
Institute; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131.
61 Adolf von Harnack, “Gedanken über Wissenschaft und Leben (1905),” in Wissenschaftspolitische
Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2001), 225; Fabianʼs edi-
tion strangely giving 1907 as date for the statement, which already in 1905 had been printed.
62 Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. 1, 2nd ed., XXI-XXII.

62          Marco Frenschkowski

expressing himself with much more restraint.63 A few years later Frazer’s first bi-
ographer, taking down ideas from his almost daily contact with the scholar for
many years, wrote: “The most important intellectual achievements of the nine-
teenth century, it might be maintained, arose not so much from the discoveries
of new facts, though these were tremendous, as from the use of a new method of
approaching and interpreting these facts. The new weapon was the Comparative
Method”.64 How do the concepts of comparison by these scholars relate to the
concept of synthesis as defined by the Theosophical Society? The Secret Doctrine
famously was subtitled: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy.65 But
this is just a first suspicion if we may say so that these writers did not move in
completely different agendas as accepted history of the humanities usually has
taken for granted, and further discussion is needed.

5 The Science of Religion in a Social World
  of Competing Learned Societies
The new approach of comparative religion has a well-defined social aspect as
well, which brings us to look at learned societies and patterns of competition.
Such societies in Victorian Britain are a primary forum for discussion on aca-
demic or learned subjects. Most of them were not strictly academic in the sense
of University affiliation, and membership was open to all interested men (rarely
women) of scholarly inclinations. They were the academic and learned equiva-
lent of the gentlemenʼs club as the (still very intellectual) Athenaeum Club
founded in 1824.66 The Royal Society, archetype of all such societies, certainly
had much more public reputation, but as its membership was strictly qualified
and restricted, it is only partially comparable to other learned societies. These
also often had specific membership requirements, and quite high fees, which
restricted them to upper middle-class and upper-class men. Membership num-
bers of one or two hundred are common (rarely more: even the Athenaeum
Club originally was restricted to 400 members, later to 1000), and as we will

63 Cf. Timothy Larsen, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
64 Angus R. Downie, James George Frazer: The Portrait of a Scholar (London: Watts, 1940), 9–10.
65 Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy,
2 vols. (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888).
66 Cf. Seth A. Thévoz, Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London
Clubs (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain         63

see, often the same people took part in different societies. Often membership
included the receipt of the publications of the society, though there were also
“publishing societies” specializing in making sources available as the Roxburghe
Club, the Bannatyne Club, the Royal Historical Society and others. Some had a
more oriental emphasis as the Royal Asiatic Society Oriental Translation Fund, es-
tablished in 1828, a subscription printing club organized by the Royal Asiatic
Society of Great Britain and Ireland, which itself was founded in 1823. Another me-
dium of communication was the society conference: a form a scientific gathering
differing markedly from the meetings of the older academies, and much more
open to a wider public.
     And they competed. Indeed who competes with whom in public standing is
one of the most vital questions in the history of science as well as of religion,
particularly in modernity, where such conflicts are often not too obvious: hid-
den agendas of competition in the science community and in wider society.
This will be a basic consideration in this study. As an emerging science, with
whom or with what did Religious Studies or comparative religion compete?
Which prerogative of interpretation was at stake? Learned societies often came
into being by competing ideas about certain subjects. The Anthropological
Society of London e.g. was founded in 1863 by Sir Richard Francis Burton
(1821–1890) and Dr. James Hunt (1833–1869), breaking away from the older
Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843. It clearly defined itself in op-
position to the older society, dealing with physical as well as cultural aspects of
mankind. A few years later, in 1871, with a much larger clientele and larger fi-
nancial possibilities the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland (RAI) was founded, open also to non-British members, and again with a
much wider schedule of interests than the earlier anthropological societies
could express. Its prestigious Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture, established
in 1900 in memory of Thomas Huxley, was given in 1907 to E. B. Tylor, in 1916
to Sir J. G. Frazer, and in 1923 to E. S. Hartland, the only recipients during these
years that might be called scholars of religion.
     The scientific community perhaps best comparable in its unfolding research
and growing deeply inter-connected group of specialized scholars was the field of
folklore studies. It will become immediately clear why we mention this here. Its
agenda was that of a new science as well: “Folk-lore is a science by itself, with
distinct work of its own to accomplish”.67 The Folk-Lore Society (later Folklore
Society) was founded in 1878 in London to study traditional vernacular culture,

67 Edwin S. Hartland et al., “Folk-Lore Terminology,” The Folk-Lore Journal 2, no. 11 (Nov. 1884),
348.